Report offers MPs guidelines on how to best use social media

David Cameron has only been an active twitterer since 6 October.
By 10 October, @David_Cameron had managed to accrue 108,937
followers, follow 34 tweeters, send 11 tweets and abide by only two
of the four guidelines offered by the Parliament Street Research
Team (PSRT) on how MPs can become savvy Twitter users.

PSRT's report, @Parliament:
the failure of MPs to connect, was published the day
after Mr Cameron took his first tentative steps into the
Twittersphere with the mildly wry offering: "I'm starting
Conference with this new Twitter feed about my role as Conservative
Leader. I promise there won't be too many tweets...". The report,
co-authored by Surrey Heath Borough Councillor Paul Deach
(@PaulDeach, 785 followers), encourages MPs to engage with an
indifferent, apathetic electorate, only 32 per
cent of which turned out to vote in the 2012 local elections,
and offers advice for backbench MPs looking to connect to the
electorate via social media.

"Apathy isn't solved by forcing people to vote as this simply
addresses the symptom and not the problem. What we need is for
politicians to start addressing the concerns of their constituents
and to start engaging with them much more frequently and much more
prominently," explains the Parliament Street report. "The best way
to do this is by actually communicating with them via a medium that
will reach a large audience, i.e. social media."

The report cites recent instances in which the widely publicised
actions of politicians only succeeded in estranging them from their
electorate -- at the height of the MPs expenses scandal, for
instance, a Hansard Society study indicated that 37 per cent of the
electorate thought that the UK system of governance had to be
reformed. The report suggests that if the electorate is to gain any
faith in its MPs, politicians should turn to social media, "the
most effective way for politicians to engage with people and to
show an interest in them."

The problem is MPs don't seem to be very good at using social
media -- despite being allowed to use Twitter during Commons debates since
October 2011. Only 331 MPs had Twitter accounts at the start of
2012, the Prime Minister himself reaching out to the tweeting
electorate only as recently as October. Parliament Street's report
looked at what lessons could be learnt from the best of the 331
tweeting backbench MPs (given that front bench MPs could rely on
wider media coverage to bump up their legions of followers),
ranking them according to their Twitter followers.

Parliament Street commissioned Yatterbox to provide data on all
MPs who used Twitter in the month of September 2012. Labour's Tom
Watson came out on top, with 92,518 followers, followed by Steve
Rotheram of Labour with 18,745, David Lammy of Labour with 17,821,
Kerry McCarthy of Labour with 16,096 and Zac Goldsmith of the
Conservatives with 15,075. At a party level, Labour came out on top
with 30 of the 50 most successful MPs on Twitter (Conservatives:
15; Liberal Democrats: 5). The Conservative party was the least
successful, with 30 of the 50 least successful MPs on Twitter
(Labour: 14; Liberal Democrats 6). The least successful MP (or
rather, most unpopular) was Labour's Dai Havard, with 56 followers
and a total of zero tweets.

Parliament Street determined that the most "successful' tweeting
MPs would follow four basic rules: updating their Twitter account
regularly; retweeting and answer questions when possible; offering
links to campaigns and groups linked to their constituency or
party; and, possibly most importantly, maintaining a funny and
normal persona on their account. In essence, the report suggests
that Mr Cameron could drastically improve his ability to reach out
to Twitter users by being as radical as to retweet the occasional
constituent and post the odd lolcat video. Grassroots politics
at its best.

Parliament Street also asked Surrey Heath Borough Councillor
Paul Deach -- a "successful user" of social media -- to prepare a
report on what he considered to be good practice in the local
area.

"It does seem that the successful utilisation of social media
helps to break down the poor image politicians have of being aloof
and divorced from the real world," he wrote. "The sheer run away
success of some backbench MPs shows that there is a large, and
growing, number of people who are ready to listen to MPs so long as
they are accessible and interesting. The challenge facing MPs is to
make sure that they use social media in such a way as to show these
qualities."

Deach also recommended the use of KLOUT, a free service that
measures a user's influence within a social network.

Parliament Street's report certainly highlights the failure of
many MPs to engage with social networks like Twitter -- though the
report doesn't go so far as to suggest that it will transform the
electorate's opinion of Parliament if MPs begin tweeting and adding
posts to Tumblr accounts. Twitter can damage professional
reputations just as easily as it can build them -- politicians such
as Aidan Burley and Diane
Abbott have already landed themselves in dangerous political
waters over careless tweets -- and if all 650 MPs were to become
active tweeters, it might only amplify the amount of PR-friendly
noise coming out of Westminster.

However, "If MPs heed this lesson," writes Deach, "and start to
ask questions about how they can use Twitter more effectively and
start to become more successful, we should see more people engaging
with politicians, receiving updates and talking to their elected
representatives. That can only be a good thing for our
democracy."